Bloomview is an online application that allows flower shops to send flower arrangement pics before delivery as an added service to generate online reviews. This app is meant to help to decrease customer complaints and improve customer service. Also, to strengthen the flower shop's online reputation through reviews.
Bloomview is part of the Nuflorist brand ecosystem. This brand provides a set of tools that will change the way small floral businesses operate—the perfect arrangement of services that every floral shop needs to succeed.
It should be noted that this project was accompanied by a three-month user experience design, followed by a digital implementation plan. I also worked with another designer in the discovery and research part. This project helped me deepen my understanding of user experience design and exploration.
Sharing photos of customer orders is standard practice for almost all florists. However, there was no effective way to send, reply, and track satisfaction. The challenge was to design an experience that helps share customer orders with the florist and enhance the reputation of the small flower business through reviews. Bloomview app makes all this possible.
During the competitive analysis, I research what other apps already offer a similar service to Bloomview product. In this case, there wasn’t a direct competitor, but indirect competitors are 1800flowers, EZ Review, and Simple Reviews. The specific competitor aspects to compare were interaction, visual design, and content.
Our competitors EZ Review and Simple Reviews, focus on the reputation of management and online reviews for businesses. The competitor of 1800flowers' application offers services more focused on the delivery of flowers and gifts. All competitors have an application, and visually, the design of the applications uses light colors, a simple user interface, and they are easy for users to navigate.
EZ Review and Simple Reviews services focus on online feedback requests from company customers via text message or email. Value propositions aim to improve your company's reputation and gain valuable customer feedback. The 1800flowers app focuses on large-scale flower and gift delivery in the US or worldwide to 195 countries.
EZ Review and Simple Reviews focus on a similar audience, small business owners, and have a similar set of offerings. They offer the option to invites customers to leave reviews and share across any choose review site. However, they don’t focus on florists as the main audience than Bloomview does.
- Competitor products don't offer a specific process for florists.
- Competitor products don't offer customization options for businesses.
- Competitor products need to improve accessibility features.
- Offer customization options that allow the user to brand their business on the review requests.
- Create a straightforward process for taking photo and messages templates.
With the knowledge of Design Thinking, I conducted interviews with florists, flower shop managers, and business owners from South Florist Group. During a workshop, we identified some key user problems we wanted to solve. Based on their responses, I formulated a 2x2 matrix to map issues important to Bloomview’s customers vs business.
Some of the high-level features we wanted to include in the app were:
- Request reviews by text or email.
- Pre-written messages.
- Review site links incorporated in text messaging and Emails.
- Flower Arrangement Quality Control.
Using the qualitative data from interviews and survey results, I defined the two target group profiles David (Floral Designer, 45) and Mary (Florist, 25), to better empathize with my main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs. I created a user persona to put a face on Bloomview’s target user. These personas were roughly based on the users interviewed and visualize various aspects of their behavior and motivations.The main objective of these personas is to have an application to manage your clients' orders easily and not have to spend a lot of time while making the floral arrangements.
David is a floral designer who needs an easy app experience to send customer photos of his floral arrangements because he's not technically savvy enough.
Who: A busy floral designer.
What: David wants to get customer approval before sending his floral arrangement and get more reviews for his flower shop.
Where: David is likely using the app at work, on the go.
When: David gets frustrated when he opens the app, starting from the very beginning of the user journey.
Why: David doesn’t have a lot of experience with apps.
How: David wants to go easily from the home screen to take a photo, to the message's configuration, and to the confirmation screen.
As with any project, some things worked well, and others were challenging. Since we worked with a dev team in India, we accommodated the time difference, challenging the QA process. However, I had the opportunity to improve my soft and hard skills and collaborate with developers and stakeholders during the implementation process.
If there were more time and resources available, I'd do...
- More research, as it's an extensive topic with many factors
- Development of experience-based journey maps
- More user testing in a flower shop